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an almost total disregard of the purposes for which a hospital exists. So far as I am able to learn, the conditions just described were not peculiar to the city of Lyons. "During the reign of Francis the First (1515-1547) there were in the main room (thirty-six feet wide) of the Infirmary of Hôtel-Dieu at Paris," says Boisseau, "six rows of beds (three feet wide), each one of which accommodated ordinarily three (at times even four) sick persons, who necessarily were very uncomfortable. This is not all; for there were also in this same infirmary seven or eight beds which were designed to accommodate from twenty-five to thirty infants or young children, the great majority of whom died from the poor quality of air which they had to breathe in that institution." I do not need to furnish additional proofs in corroboration of the truth of the statement that during the Renaissance the French civil hospitals contributed practically nothing to the advance of medical science. It is possible that in Italy these institutions may have been better managed, for, in the account which he gives of his trip to Rome, Luther speaks of having visited a hospital which particularly attracted his notice by reason of its orderliness and the conspicuous cleanliness of every part of the building. As an offset, however, to this favorable testimony I should state that in some documents discovered in comparatively recent times there are memoranda relating to the duties of the medical staff in the civil hospital of Padua (1569)—a city in which was located the most famous medical school to be found anywhere in Europe during the sixteenth century. These memoranda read as follows: "There shall be a doctor of physic upon whom rests the duty of visiting all the poor patients in the building, females as well as males; a doctor of surgery whose duty it is to apply ointments to all the poor people in the hospital who have wounds of any kind; and a barber who is competent to do, for the women as well as for the men, all the other things that a good surgeon usually does." (The word "surgeon" is evidently employed here in the sense of barber-surgeon, and not in the modern sense of the word.) This testimony and that furnished on a pre-